SHEhad been shopping all morning on Oxford Street and Bond Street with Lady Sterne. She had spent money quite unnecessarily on a cornflower-trimmed straw hat. She had enough hats already to wear for a month without wearing the same one twice, she was sure. She also had scarcely slept the night before—for the first time since she came to London. And there was a connection between the purchase of the hat and the sleepless night. Ashley was going to take her walking during the afternoon in the Mall.
He had not spoken a word to her at Vauxhall after his initial greeting, not until he took his leave, early, before the rest of them. She had just returned from her stroll with Viscount Burdett, Doris, and Andrew. He had bowed over her hand after standing and speaking with the others first. She had thought he was going to leave without speaking to her at all. But he had.
“I have asked Lady Sterne if she will be at home tomorrow afternoon, Emmy,” he had said. “I will call and take you walking in St. James’s Park, if I may?”
She had smiled and nodded. In that moment there had been only Ashley and no consideration at all of the wisdom of being close to him. He had left before she saw the annoyance on Viscount Burdett’s face. But he had no reason to be annoyed. She did not belong to him and did not intend to. Besides, she walked and drove with other gentlemen. She liked it that way.
“Lord Ashley Kendrick is a member of your family, Lady Emily?” he had asked her, leaning toward her so that, she guessed, no one else in the box would hear what he was saying. “A type of brother?”
She had smiled, opening her fan and cooling her face with it.
“Then I take it unkindly in a mere brother to monopolize your time for a whole afternoon, madam,” he had said. “How will I live with the disappointment?”
She had laughed at his foolish gallantry and stretched out her arm to fan his face for a few moments.
But she had slept very little all night. Less than a month ago she had expected never to see him again. And then Aunt Marjorie and Lord Quinn had decided to marry, and she had known that Ashley would come for the wedding. She had been dismayed. She had not wanted him to come to London, just as a little more than a month ago she had not wanted him to come home to Bowden. Her life had to be lived without Ashley, and it was just too painful to see him.
Especially now. All last evening, after he had joined Viscount Burdett’s party, although she had not once looked at him until he took his leave of her, she had felt him with every part of herself. Not just with her heart. Not even just with aching arms and yearning lips. She had felt him with a throbbing in her womb and lower, where his body had known hers. It had been not so much desire she had felt as—knowledge.
He should not have asked her to walk with him. It was unfair. He wanted to resume the relationship with her that had always been comfortable for him. He wanted to be her brother, her friend. Did he not know now, as she had always known, that such a relationship was impossible? Would he be a friend and a brother during their walk? Or would he try again to persuade her to marry him? But surely not that. He must have seen at Vauxhall how happy she was, how much she was enjoying the Season and the company of other gentlemen. He should not have asked her.
And so she tossed and turned more than she slept during the night. And so too she went shopping during the morning and bought a new straw hat.
•••
Beforegoing to Lady Sterne’s, Ashley had a call to make on South Audley Street. It was one he had told himself all the way to London and again all morning that he need not make and should not make. Even though Lady Verney had given him her son’s address when she knew he was going to London and had urged him to leave his card there—Henry and Barbara would be honored by such a marked courtesy, she had told him—there was really no compulsion on him to call on complete strangers.
But curiosity got the better of him. He wanted—no, it was almost as if heneeded—to see the man Alice had loved and lain with before she went to India. Perhaps if he could understand that relationship, he thought foolishly, he would somehow be able to put to rest the terrible memories.
He would see if Sir Henry and Miss Verney were at home, the butler told him after he knocked on the door at South Audley Street and deposited his card on a silver tray. Ashley almost hoped that they were not, or that they would choose not to be. Verney might well wish to avoidhim,after all. But the butler returned within a couple of minutes, bowed, and asked if his lordship would follow him up to the drawing room.
A man and a woman were rising to their feet as Ashley followed the butler’s announcement into the room. The man came striding toward him, right hand extended. He was a powerful-looking man of about his own age, Ashley guessed. He was not as tall as Ashley, but he was broad-shouldered and wide-chested and gave the impression of size though he was not in any way portly. He was fashionably, though not foppishly, dressed. He wore his own fair hair tied neatly at the neck. His face was good-humored and smiling.
“Lord Ashley Kendrick,” he said. “What an honor this is. I had heard from my mother that you had returned from India and taken up residence at Penshurst. I was sorry to be from home and unable to call on you to pay my respects. And so you have called upon me instead. May I present my sister, Barbara?”
Ashley shook the offered hand and bowed to the lady, who curtsied and smiled at him. She was somewhat darker than her brother in coloring, but she shared his quiet elegance and air of good humor. She was not pretty, but then she was not quite plain either.
“Madam,” he said. “Verney. You will be pleased to hear that I left Lady Verney in good health. She sends her affectionate regards.”
“How kind of you to bring them. Do have a seat, my lord,” Barbara Verney said. “I have given directions for the tea tray to be sent up.”
Ashley sat. The suffocating hatred he had begun to feel had taken him completely by surprise. He had expected a dark, brooding, morose-looking man, the sort of man one could easily imagine to have seduced and abandoned a woman who was besotted with him. He had not expected this smiling, genial man, who would perhaps be attractive to women more for his personality than for his looks. He could almost have forgiven wariness and surliness. He could only hate the warm hospitality.
“It must be admitted,” Sir Henry said, seating himself after his sister had settled into a chair across from Ashley’s, “that we have been curious to meet the man Alice married. Have we not, Barbara? We were devastated, by the way, when news reached us a few months ago of the tragedy that befell her and your son. We wrote to you immediately, not realizing that you were on your way to England. May we express our heartfelt condolences now?”
“Yes, indeed,” Miss Verney said.
If he could have throttled the man and remained civilized, Ashley thought, he would have done so. There was not a flicker of shame or guilt on his face. “Thank you,” he said. But he was curious. He addressed himself to the sister. “You knew my wife well?”
“We grew up together,” she said, “Alice, Gregory—her brother, you know—Henry, and I.”
“And Katherine Binchley,” Sir Henry added. “Daughter of Kersey’s steward. You may have met her, though she is Katherine Smith now.”
“Yes, and Katherine too,” Miss Verney said. “We were all close as children. But we grew up and grew apart. ’Twas inevitable, I suppose. Though Henry and Gregory remained close friends. But Gregory died and Alice went to India and Katherine went away to marry Mr. Smith—all within a few months. Everything was changed.”
“But you wanted to hear about your wife as she was before you met her,” Sir Henry said. “She was always beautiful, was she not, Barbara, even as a child? Small and dainty and exquisite. By the time she was sixteen she had the whole of the county on its knees to her. The fact never went to her head. She favored no man. She was very discriminating.” He smiled.
Very discriminating. Because she had ignored the attentions of all the young men in the county except those of Verney himself?
